Power scaling of high-power thin-disk lasers with high beam quality

Abstract

We report on our development of new concepts for power scaling of thin-disk lasers with high brightness. Thin-disk laser resonators can be considered as resonators with variable internal lenses. Usually, there are dynamically stable configurations of this type of laser resonators with maximum insensitivity of the mode radius in the laser active medium to variations of the refractive power of the internal lens (thin-disk). Our concepts for power scaling include this usage of dynamically stable resonators in combination with the implementation of N > 1 disks with large mode diameters in one resonator. The goal is the implementation and the experimental demonstration of a systematic compensation of phase aberrations at high pump power using intracavity adaptive optical systems in thin-disk lasers.